(U) This invention pertains generally to guidance systems for air-to-air guided missiles and particularly to systems of the type required for air-to-air guided missile carried by strategic bombers.
(U) It must be postulated that any strategic bomber on an actual mission during wartime would have to penetrate airspace under surveillance of an early warning radar on an aircraft which serves as the control center of an "airborne warning and control system," commonly called "AWACS". Once the location of the strategic bomber has been determined, interceptors may be vectored to attack and destroy such bomber long before its desired mission may be accomplished.
(U) It is manifest that neutralization of the early warning radar of the defensive AWACS before a strategic bomber is detected or located by such a radar offers the first and best chance for such bomber successfully to pursue its mission without having to engage in combat with interceptors attached to the AWACS. That is to say, any strategic bomber should be equipped first to detect, before it is itself detected, interrogating signals from a surveillance radar of a defensive AWACS and then to interdict such radar (either by destroying the aircraft carrying such radar or by forcing shutdown before the strategic bomber itself is located).
(U) It is apparent that successful interdiction of an airborne surveillance radar requires that each strategic bomber be equipped with: (a) a "quiet" detector (meaning a search receiver and appropriate signal processors) to allow the location of such radar to be determined even in the presence of many interfering signals; and (b) a long range air-to-air guided missile which may be launched from the strategic bomber and then guided toward the airborne surveillance radar, from a point outside the maximum detection range of such radar, to an intercept, all without transmission of any kind of signal from the strategic bomber. Satisfaction of the latter requirement is, considering the state of the art, difficult to achieve because of limitations on the size and weight of any long range air-to-air missile carried by any known strategic bomber. As a matter of fact, in the tactical situation here being considered, such limitations are determinative of the distance a long range air-to-air guided missile may fly; as a result, then, the requisite guidance system for such a missile must be as small and efficient as possible and must, further, accomplish its purpose with a minimum amount of maneuvering of the missile.